EggXpert

Hey, so my HDD is getting old. I'm replacing it with a large drive. I'd like to get another boot drive, for XP/win7 install, and I can't seem to google up a comparison at all.

Another thing I'm desperately curious about - if I build the SSD out of class 6 SD cards, or CFs, or anything like that, would it still contend for speed against a 15000 RPM drive?
I ask because class 6 cards in huge sizes are coming down sooooo fast. And I know they make IDE/SATA to 2x SD card converters, and I'd love to build a drive out of that, if it were to be really fast, compared to a hard drive.

I'm pretty sure SD cards don't use the same type of memory as SSDs...  SD cards have a much MUCH smaller number of writes before they die.. I don't believe SD / Flash technology is acceptable for very active data storage and certainly not for running an operating system..

I've had SD cards die on me after a few thousand photos...They really don't last very long compared to SSDs.  They're completely different types of memory under the hood.

 

 

Compact Flash (CF) cards are about twice as fast as SD cards and a 7200 rpm hard drive is twice as fast as a CF card (transfer rates).  If you build a big enough RAID array, you can compete with a hard drive.  The problem is with the controller.  I think they are pricey enough to make it a bad deal.

And sid is right about the lifetimes.  I have seen numbers around 10,000 read/writes to failure time.

Remember there are no 15000 rpm SATA drives, only SAS drives which require a SAS controller. so make sure you have a SAS controler if you do with a 15000 rpm the same goes for most 10,000 rpm drives with the exception of the WD's raptor drives. if you're looking purely for speed, get a handful of semi cheep SATA drives, and run them in a RAID0. Make sure your motherboard supports a RAID0 but most mid range to high end boards do. fancy raid cards are not needed for raid0 or raid1. my gaming box has 3, 250 gig drives in a raid 0, i get 175 MB/s read and write speeds, for reference one of the drives by itself gets around 75 MB/s.

just pick up a real ssd if you have the money. while 15000k drives have good access times compared to 7200s access times on ssds are pretty much non existent. That's what really makes the drives "feel" fast.

Ya, I just ran benchmarks on all my SD cards and none of them can beat 20 MB/sec read/write speeds and even those are some of the higher expensive Class 6 cards..  I mean really, that's no competition to the 150MB/sec+ transfer speeds of an SSD..